[Militant No 477, 2 November 1979, p. 8 and 9]
A Hundred Years After his Birth, Militant Celebrates a Great Revolutionary
Leon Trotsky: 1879-1979
What need is there to justify celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s birth?
Known to history by his pseudonym, Trotsky was born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein in the Ukraine on 26 October, 1879 (according to the old Russian calendar, 8 November according to the Western calendar, adopted in Russia only in 1918).
Thirty-eight years later to the day, Trotsky led the insurrection which secured the October revolution.
In the revolution of 1905, Russia’s „dress rehearsal“ for 1917, Trotsky was elected president of the Petrograd soviet. Even before 1905, Trotsky advanced his theory of the permanent revolution, predicting that Russia’s working class would not only have to take on the tasks of the liberal-capitalist revolution, but begin those of the socialist revolution – in conjunction with the international development of the socialist revolution.
His theory was brilliantly confirmed by the events of 1917/18.
With Lenin, he was acknowledged co-leader of the first ever socialist revolution. the greatest event in the history of the world. Commissar for foreign affairs in the first Soviet government, Trotsky was also the founder of the Red Army and commissar for war from 1918 to 1925.
Trotsky was also, with Lenin, co-founder of the Third, or Communist International, and wrote the manifestoes and many of the most important documents for its first five congresses.
From 1918 to 1927, Trotsky was a member of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party, and was expelled and sent into exile because the increasingly bureaucratic Stalin clique rightly regarded him as their foremost opponent.
In spite of his unrivalled record up until Lenin’s death in 1924, however, Trotsky’s subsequent contribution was no less important. In fact, Trotsky’s most valuable legacy for present day Marxists is the fact that, in the period of the isolation and degeneration of the Russian revolution, he unswervingly upheld the genuine ideas of Lenin and the Bolshevik party, and fought tenaciously to defend the real traditions of October.
Trotsky’s personal struggle against Stalinism ended on 19 August, 1940, when he was murdered by Stalin’s assassin. But nothing can bury the memory of such a revolutionary, or eradicate the ideas that he upheld throughout his long active life.
Even the leaders of the West European Communist Parties, formerly unscrupulous apologists for Stalin’s crimes. who for decades fell in with the vile denigration and falsification of Trotsky’s role, have at last been forced to admit Stalin’s responsibility for Trotsky’s murder and to promise to call for his „rehabilitation“.
They have yet, however, to accept Trotsky’s Marxist analysis of Stalinism, and the vital political conclusions which flow from it.
Yet the historical personality of Trotsky has hardly had a better fate among the „liberal“, „democratic“ opponents of Marxism.
In spite of the fact that Trotsky, many of his family, and tens of thousands of the International Left Opposition paid for their opposition to Stalinism with their lives, there have been many attempts to associate Trotsky with the totalitarian dictatorship.
Trotsky has been painted as an „arch bureaucrat“, a „militarist“ and would-be dictator. Alternatively, it is argued that, although Trotsky organised an opposition to Stalin, he, like Lenin, espoused ideas that led inevitably to totalitarian dictatorship.
Nothing could be further from the truth! Only a fear of the genuine, revolutionary ideas of Trotsky far outweighing the liberals distaste for Stalinism – which, after all, can be put to good use in discrediting the idea of socialism – makes such distortions possible.
Of course, with Lenin, Trotsky was an uncompromising advocate of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But, again like Lenin, he held the Marxist view that the proletarian dictatorship had to be based on „proletarian, or Soviet, democracy“ , not on personal dictatorship and totalitarian rule, as in the later Stalinist caricature.
A life and death struggle between genuine Bolshevism and its usurpers
The purpose of a workers‘ state is to consolidate the conquests of the revolution, to suppress the resistance of the old possessing classes, and to guarantee the social and political supremacy of the working class. This can not be achieved unless the workers, the poor peasants, and the other exploited strata enjoy full freedom of expression and association.
In fact, the soviet government, which gave the land to the peasants and placed industry in the hands of the workers, was the broadest and freest democracy ever established in history.
The various Soviet and local committees, deliberated freely and often expressed sharp differences. The measures of the Bolshevik leaders were based on constant appeals to the masses, and relied entirely upon their support and initiative.
In the first five years „the dictatorship of the proletariat“, which meant the domination of the working class over the transformation of society, could not have been further removed from dictatorship in the sense of repressive, totalitarian rule.
During the civil war, however, when Britain, France and other capitalist powers supported the armed counterrevolutionary campaigns of the White generals, political freedom was inevitably severely curtailed. In the early 1920s, when the young workers‘ state was threatened with extinction, the Bolsheviks‘ government was pushed into placing a ban on opposition parties.
For Trotsky, as for Lenin, the curtailment of political freedom was a temporary, emergency measure, necessitated by civil war. But when he feared that the isolation of the revolution was giving rise to the growth of a bureaucracy in the party, the soviets, the army and elsewhere, more and more concerned for its own vested interests, Trotsky was the first to sound the alarm.
As early as 1923 Trotsky began to warn, in a series of articles which later appeared as ‚The New Course‘. of the dangers of a post-revolutionary reaction, and the incipient growth of bureaucracy in the Bolshevik party and the soviets. He began to protest at the preponderance and arbitrary behaviour of the party’s bureaucracy.
Before he died in 1924, Lenin agreed with Trotsky on a bloc in the party to fight bureaucracy.
When Trotsky and a group of left oppositionists began a fight for a „revival of proletarian democracy“ , the politburo was obliged to promise to restore freedom of expression and criticism in the Communist Party. But Stalin and his associates made sure this remained a dead letter.
The life and death struggle between genuine Bolshevism and its bureaucratic usurpers had begun.
At first warning of the dangers of a Bonapartist reaction. Trotsky showed that the events leading up to his forced exile abroad in 1928 made it an accomplished fact.
It was only Trotsky and the International Left Opposition which provided a clear Marxist analysis of the development of Stalinism
Up until 1934/35, Trotsky continued to advocate reform in the Soviet Union, aiming at the revival of soviet democracy. Subsequently he concluded that the bureaucratic dictatorship which had strangled the democracy of October could be removed only through a political revolution.
It was only Trotsky and the International Left Opposition which provided a clear, Marxist analysis of the development of Stalinism – and which was able to maintain a consistent, Marxist opposition.
In a stream of articles, and above all in his brilliant book, ‚The Revolution Betrayed‘ (1936), Trotsky laid bare the basis of Stalin’s dictatorship.
Stalin, Trotsky made clear, represented the new privileged bureaucratic strata which, through a bloody political counter-revolution, had usurped the fruits of the revolution and deprived the working class of its political control.
Nevertheless, the bureaucracy preserved the economic and social gains of the revolution as the basis of its power.
Despite the bureaucracy, the nationalisation of production and the planned economy demonstrated its immense achievements, though at a far greater cost than under workers‘ democracy. International isolation, however, produced intense contradictions in Russia’s still backward economy. The meagre national income, with a scarcity of basic necessities and consumer goods and conflicts over their distribution, inevitably gave rise to new social divisions, with the ruling stratum, headed by Stalin. promoting its own privileges and power.
Because of the socialised property relations, on the one side, and the rule of a despotic bureaucracy, on the other, Trotsky characterised Russia as a deformed workers‘ state. He defined Stalin’s regime as one of proletarian Bonapartism
Post-revolutionary Russia was a transitional society arising from the abolition of landlordism and capitalism, but by no means a socialist society, which would presuppose the conscious, democratic rule of the working class.
Cutting through the „Stalin cult“, Trotsky explained the degeneration of the Soviet Union not as the result of Stalin’s personal struggle for power, but as the result of a deep-rooted process of bureaucratisation resulting from the isolation of the revolution.
Stalin’s „theory“ of „socialism in one country“ was primarily a rationalisation of the bureaucracy’s conservative role. Later, the policies and ideology of Stalin themselves reinforced the isolation and bureaucratisation, gradually playing a more and more open counterrevolutionary role on the world arena.
While not ruling out the possibility of a restoration of capitalism in Russia given massive defeats of the working class internationally, Trotsky stood for a supplementary, political revolution to restore the workers‘ democracy introduced by the October revolution. Its programme was the programme of Lenin:
* Free and democratic elections with the right of recall of all officials in the party, the state, and industry;
* No official to be paid more than a skilled worker: and end to bureaucratic privilege and corruption;
* Abolition of the standing army, and its replacement by democratic workers‘ militias;
* For democratic workers‘ control and management in industry, and a return to the democratic rule of the workers‘ and peasants‘ councils created by the October revolution.
Trotsky has left an indestructible legacy
This is the only analysis and programme of opposition to Stalinism that has stood the test of time. In the 1930s, because of the horrendous scale of Stalin’s terror, on the one side, and the rise of its fascist „twin“ in Italy, Germany and Spain, on the other, intellectuals who had previously supported Trotsky’s position rejected the idea that the Soviet Union was a “deformed workers’“ state.
They advanced the idea that Russia’s ruling bureaucracy was a new and independent social class, a “managerial class“ (according to James Burnham) or a „bureaucratic collectivist class“ (according to Max Shachtman).
This led to the idea that under Stalinism Russia was not even a degenerate workers‘ state, but merely a new variant of capitalism, so-called „state capitalism“. In other words, according to these critics of Trotsky, nothing remained of the October revolution and the basic tasks of the social revolution still have to be carried out.
Developments themselves have clearly refuted these ideas. The former champions of the theory of „state capitalism“ are noticeably silent today.
There are certainly acute economic problems and growing political conflicts in the Stalinist states: but they are of a fundamentally different character from those in the capitalist countries. There has been no „convergence“ of totalitarian monopoly capitalism and totalitarian „state capitalism“ as postulated by Burnham, Shachtman, and others.
Ironically, in the post-war period, Trotsky’s ideas came to be questioned from an entirely opposite standpoint. Quasi-Marxists, like Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, advanced the view after Stalin’s death that with Khrushchev’s ‚liberalisation‘ there would be a process of ‚de-Stalinisation‘, with the gradual restoration of democracy.
In other words, the political revolution advocated by Trotsky was no longer necessary; the bureaucracy would be reformed out of existence …
Events themselves have demonstrated how false this idea was. The Hungarian workers‘ rising of 1956 was – and remains – an unmistakable harbinger of the political revolution predicted by Trotsky. The soviets established in the space of a few days by the Hungarian workers returned virtually point by point to the programme of the political revolution advanced by Trotsky.
After 1956, the bureaucracy in Russia and Eastern Europe undoubtedly attempted to remove some of the more oppressive features of Stalin’s rule and partially meet the economic demands of the workers in order to dampen political opposition.
But have not the events in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the oppositional movements elsewhere in the Stalinist states confirmed Trotsky’s perspectives? Among the dissident intellectuals, some like the Medvedev brothers , have undoubtedly been influenced by Trotsky’s writings and have been groping in a confused way towards his revolutionary conclusions.
But wherever there has been a movement of the workers, as in Poland, they have stood clearly in defence of all the social gains achieved under Stalinism, albeit in a grotesquely distorted way, and advanced exactly the same demands for the establishing of workers‘ democracy originally put forward by the Left Opposition.
On the hundredth anniversary of Trotsky’s birth – and thirty-nine years after his assassination – the Kremlin bureaucrats still contemplate with fear and dread the wider dissemination of Trotsky’s ideas, which have undoubtedly experienced a re-birth in the underground opposition circles which certainly exist among the advanced workers of Russia and Eastern Europe.
Trotsky’s ideas are again being brought to the fore because the relatively progressive role played by the bureaucracy while the nationalised, planned economy was still able to develop Russia, is now completely played out. The bureaucracy is now an absolute fetter on further progress.
The vast, highly educated, highly cultured working class that has developed even under Stalinism is straining at its chains. It is only a matter of time before the workers move to throw the parasitic bureaucracy off their backs.
The bureaucracy’s undiminished fear of Trotsky’s ideas and the instinctive way in which the active opponents of Stalinism strive to re-discover and grasp them are the finest tribute history could bestow on Trotsky.
For today’s Marxists, Trotsky’s books and articles of the 1930s and 1940, writings which could only have resulted from his involvement in the struggles of those years, are an indispensible guide to present-day understanding and action.
Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism retains all its validity today. The theory of ‚proletarian Bonapartism‘, together with the theory of ‚permanent revolution‘, provide the only key to understanding the Stalinist states, of Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and a number of other countries.
And Trotsky’s writings on the strategy and tactics of socialist revolution produced in his last years remain a Marxist’s goldmine.
Frequently, Trotsky’s critics have scornfully pointed to the fact that his perspectives for the second world war and its aftermath were not borne out. The war, he predicted, would be followed by revolutionary upheavals which would decide the fate of Stalinism and capitalism, with either successful social revolution in the west and political revolution in Russia – or a barbarous capitalist counter-revolution, East and West.
Trotsky was not at all wrong in so far as the war was followed by massive revolutionary upheavals. What he did not foresee – and could not have predicted – was the relative strengthening of Stalinism.
The Stalinist and reformist leaders of the workers‘ movement together derailed the post-war movements and handed the shattered states and economies of Italy, France, Greece and other countries back to the capitalist powers on a plate – thus laying the political foundation for a new period of prolonged capitalist upswing and relative stability.
But the world recession of 1974/75 signalled the end of the long post-war boom. The working class of the advanced capitalist countries, whom Trotsky always regarded as the key to the socialist revolution, are again moving into action against capitalism, especially in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Britain. Tomorrow, it will be France, Germany – and America.
Meanwhile, the struggles of the oppressed people of the ex-colonial world, which continued in spite of the post-war boom, is beginning to take on an even greater intensity. And these movements will go together with the coming upheavals in Russia and Eastern Europe, and interact with them.
Who will say, now, that Trotsky’s optimism, even though expressed in a period of the blackest reaction, was just a ‚tragic illusion‘?
„The experience of my life,“ Trotsky told the Dewey Commission set up to refute Stalin’s monstrous purge-trials, „In which there has been no lack of either success or failure, has not only not destroyed my faith in the clear bright future of mankind, but, on the contrary, has given it an indestructible temper. This faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity, which at the age of eighteen I took with me into the workers‘ quarters of the provincial Russian town of Nikolayev – this faith I have preserved fully and completely. It has become more mature but no less ardent.”
Later, when Stalin’s assassin was already poised to strike at his opponent’s skull, Trotsky wrote his testament re-affirming his revolutionary optimism.
“Whatever may be the the circumstances of my death. I shall die with unshaken faith in the Communist future. This faith in man and his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion … I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall and clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
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